I've heard stories like this on Car Talk. They usually recommend setting the car on fire. Sorry, agro.

Sorry too

Ugh, dead rodent smell. Yeah, I'd say that fire is your best option now.
(not a trained mechanic)

Oh my god. I like rodents and rats in particular, but that's just foul. Wild rats smell bad enough when they're alive. They don't really need to be climbing up into cars, dying, and putrifying there.


I'd guess having the nursery pay for it would be a long shot, huh? Best case, they should get a visit from your local Vector Control.

A few rats up in a tree is one thing, but having nocturnal rats running amok and foraging in daylight = major infestation. Or NYC. The ones you saw in daylight were the weaklings!

I dated a girl a long time ago who had a rat problem. They'd come up from inside the walls and cavort in the kitchen drawers. We bought a pair of traps - not the kind you see in the comics, but these plastic things that were big enough for a rat to get its head into, and springloaded like a motherfucker. I bought a pair, and put them near each other at right angles.

One night in bed, we hear a *snap*

"I'll check in the morning."

In the morning, I opened the drawer. One trap was shut closed, with some brown fur sticking out of it. Perplexed, I opened the trap and found Mr. Rat's head. Where the rest of him went, I could only wonder.

Then there was the daisy chain. Two rats, two traps. We heard them snap in the night.

"I'll check in the morning."

Rat one had gotten its head caught in one trap, so he's dead. Rat two came along, saw rat one, and decided to have a snack. In the process, two got his side into the other trap. I picked up the traps by the ends, and it was a dead rodent garland that went trap->rat->rat->trap.

At my first shitty apartment in Brooklyn, we had a rat/mouse problem. The guy I subleased from set the traps out, but they kept springing with no rats or mice being caught. He then bought a closed circuit camera deal, hooked it up to his VHS player and learned that the rats were just stealing the bait. That's when he devised this ingenious plan.

He stacked some VHS tapes up high enough in a staircase pattern to where if a rat stood up on its hind legs, it wouldn't reach anything on top of the top tape. Then he put the trap on top, with the bait end dangling off into space and the spring part on the top tape. The theory was that the rat would climb the stairs, reach for the bait, and then SNAP! No more rat.

One day, I get home and he is dancing with glee. "Come take a look at this!" he crowed. Pushing a VHS tape into his player, he chortled as we watched a mouse come up to his trap, look at it for a while, climb the stairs and SNAP!

The best part is that apparently he'd been home while that was going on and right after the trap catches, you see him come out of his room and do a little war dance.

Wow trondant. That's pretty sweet!

I guess one dead rat in the car isn't as bad as an epic infestation.

loq, I just called the nursery and they sounded somewhat horrified (although they're knee-deep in rats, they should be used to this kind of thing). The owner is calling me back -- I might get some free plants or something out of it!

Useful advice: Right Guard deoderant and/or Febreeze may get the smell out once the rat is gone.

When I lived in the East Village we had rats coming out our knees. Two stories:

On Thanksgiving, I was throwing my usual Thanksgiving Dinner for Waifs, Orphans and Strays (happening yet again this year in Asheville, email for directions) but I lived in a tenement apartment where there were no buzzers or any other way of knowing guests were arriving. So I went downstairs, all happy to see snowflakes, excited to see my friends. . . and looked down to the trash can corral with at least 15 rats cavorting and playing in the first snow of the winter. Charming, somehow, rats with snow crowns on their heads, bouncing off the trash can lids. Yet not.

Same building: I'm walking in, home from work one evening, and the crazy lady on the 1st floor comes running out at me - with three half dead rats in a big trap. She gets up in my face, shaking the rats at me, shrieking in Spanish that I'm too freaked out to understand, and the dying rats wake up at being shaken to snarl and squeal. I fled. It was bloody awful. But it did give me the moral balls later to say, when confronted by a couple of white bread yuppies on the train who were sneering at the rat patrol ads: "Oh, that doesn't really happen - " "YES. Yes it does, and I live there."

Which shut them up nicely.